Sunday, November 6, 2011

In Defense of Food (Michael Pollan)

Hardcover/Audiobook

Gary and I recently watched Food, Inc. right before doing The Master Cleanse and the timing of the two events got us interested in 1) organic food production and 2) organic food consumption. Neither of us has ever been very food snobby, but in the last couple of years we've begun cooking more adventurously -- in a way that probably would sound very tame for many cooks/eaters -- but we've tried kale, brussel sprouts, mangoes, and several other fruits and veggies for the first time during this period. We feel like fools for having so limited ourselves to such a meager selection of whole foods while shoveling mass-produced fake foods into our mouths willy-nilly. I haven't given up Coke or Snickers, but I'm not nearly so ignorant as I was.

This book gives a few clear-cut rules for moving toward a more natural and healthy diet (e.g. Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food and try not to eat alone) as well as an interesting look at how nutritionism has been trying to fix the damage that food processing has done to our bodies rather than rejecting the ingestion of processed foods...it's completely frustrating to think about this stuff too much. Better to take myself into my own hands and do what I can in my home.

This book does get a bit self-righteous every so often and the reader on the audiobook sounded like the drone of a filmstrip narrator, but the bulk of the text was eye-opening. I'm glad I read it and can't imagine that we can go back to mindless gobbling. At least I hope we can't.

B+